Friday, September 10, 2010

Ummmmmmm....okay, so.....in 1990 a man named Geoff Atkinson had an AMAZING and HILARIOUS idea for a sitcom. He took his idea to the satellite television channel Galaxy, which was part of British Satellite Broadcasting, who also thought it was an AMAZING and HILARIOUS idea and promptly commissioned a series. So far, so normal, right?

Geoff's AMAZING and HILARIOUS idea was a kind of radical spin on '50s US sitcoms like 'Leave It To Beaver', 'I Love Lucy' and, particularly, 'The Honeymooners'. The show left in the cheesy plots, light atmosphere and canned applause for character entrances, but substituted the standard lead couple for......aahh........Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun.

Yeah. you heard me. Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun.

Now, you would think THAT in itself would be AMAZING and HILARIOUS enough, right?

WRONG-O!! They live in an apartment in a US city, next door to........a couple of STEREOTYPICAL JEWS!!!

I mean........just............wow.

Really.

Who WRITES this stuff?!?! Uhh...well..GEOFF ATKINSON. THAT'S who!!

Now, what to CALL this magnificent octopus? Well, why not take the whole '50's US sitcom THANG and run with it? Yeeeeeah, THAT sounds good. How about we call it.....

'kay? Happy now? Right. So, as you might expect, the very IDEA of the show (that is to EVERYONE except Geoff, Galaxy and British Satellite Broadcasting) was considered to be in MONUMENTALLY bad taste. Don't get me wrong, we Brits have a long history of Hitler-related comedy....from Dad's Army (Which chronicled the shenanigans of a platoon of Home Guardsmen)

....to 'Allo 'Allo (which chronicled the shenanigans of the occupants of France during ze German occupation).....

....lunatic comic GENIUS Spike Milligan had spent a fair amount of time making fun of Hitler, as revenge for dragging him into the war and ruining his mental health...

....and, of course, the Monty Python team had dressed up as Hitler and various cronies during the moments in which they weren't dressed as women and shrieking....

.....so, really, Hitler as a figure of fun was a well-established idea here. I mean, y'know, Psych 101 and all that - 'reducing a figure of power and evil to a figure of fun dis-empowers said figure' - BUT, the difference HERE was that Hitler was the LEAD character - thus meaning that we were supposed to 'like' or 'empathise' with him at some point, AND, the double whammy, the idea of his neighbours being Jewish essentially made light of the Holocaust and the struggle of Jews during WWII. THEY were ALSO reduced to being figures of fun, and also, in a way, subordinate to Hitler, seeing as how they functioned as nothing more than third and fourth bananas to his character.

It goes without saying that the show was CANNEDimmediately following the broadcast of the first episode, and was NEVER seen again. Somewhat strangely, Galaxy actually filmed several other episodes, aside from the pilot, which leads one to suspect that they honestly thought there wouldn't be a problem with the show. Cheeeeeeez, talk about an error in judgement.

Obviously, no more episodes were broadcast after the pilot was shown and pretty much universally condemned, and the entire show was relegated to the dustbin of history, only to be resurrected briefly on '50 Most Controversial TV Moments!!' clips shows........HOWEVER, through the MAGIC of Youtube, you can relive ze glory days of ze reich all over again, and bathe in the magic of the 'lost televisual gem' that WAS and IS 'Heil Honey, I'm Home!'

If after THAT you still want MORE, then you are a glutton for punishment, BUT I shall reward you by allowing you to download your very own copy of the pilot, rendered in low quality Scheisse-Vision!!